Everything Must Go!

Making a point ... Marisa Carnesky in House of Knives. Photograph: Tristram Kenton

With Lucy Prebble's Enron and David Hare's The Power of Yes coming shortly, no one could accuse the theatre of ducking the crisis in capitalism. The Soho gets in first with this collection of 10 short pieces about our current woes. The result, written and rehearsed at great speed, is rather like a topical, intimate revue: not everything works but you have to admire the Soho's readiness to grapple with the global fiscal fiasco.

The best pieces are those that are pungent and precise rather than hand-wringingly apocalyptic. Paula B. Stanic's 6 Minutes, for instance, shows a woman stoically occupying her office in sympathy with an arbitrarily sacked shopfloor worker: it nails the CBI myth that employers and employees are drawing closer together.

And, although more fanciful, Megan Barker's Anaphylactic focuses on a Deal or No Deal contestant winning a box of honeybees at the very moment when their disappearance is causing concern: sexily performed by Lara Pulver, the piece cleverly links our casino society with environmental chaos.

The show also manages to view the current situation with occasional bursts of wry humour. Marisa Carnesky demonstrates recent mortgage madness by sticking an audience volunteer in her once proud home and proceeding to puncture it with knives: an old Magic Circle trick, but it neatly makes its point.

Steve Thompson and Rachel Dawson also contribute a couple of songs showing the banking collapse as a form of musical chairs. Best of all is Oladipo Agboluaje's Set Piece, in which a self-styled cinematic auteur from Haringey goes to Nigeria both to exercise his artistic muscles and impose his world-view on a local actor played with mutinous gaiety by Jimmy Akingbola.

If there is a moral, it is that it is best to be specific when dealing with financial crisis. Ron McCants, for instance, comes up with a piece of American realism in which a West Virginia miner is driven, out of economic desperation, to murder a Mexican immigrant.

I was less impressed with those pieces that suggest we are all doomed. Kay Adshead argues British homeless families will also be forced to kill for self-preservation: what she lacks is the social precision of her American colleague. And Will Eno's climactic sketch, indicating that western civilisation may well disappear, lapses into generalities.

In short, it's a mixed bag. It is held together by the suitably economic direction of Lisa Goldman and Esther Richardson and is well acted. "It's hard to talk about a thing in the middle of a thing," says a character in Eno's piece. But the show itself proves that is actually the best time.